


Something to Believe

by just_quintessentially_me



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friendship, I'm Sorry, Introspection, Love, Sad, like uber angst, short fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 11:15:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4833341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_quintessentially_me/pseuds/just_quintessentially_me
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Levi Ackerman had never been much of a believer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something to Believe

**Author's Note:**

> The great tumblr migration continues! Why have my fanfics in one place when I can confuse myself by having them in two!
> 
> This was written for the levihanweek prompt: Stars

Levi Ackerman had never been much of a believer.

Most of the younger recruits started out with a religion of some kind or another. Whether it was that bat shit crazy wall cult or one of the religions of old – they liked to believe in a higher power; that something, somewhere, was looking out for them.

He’d seen too much shit to be wooed by religion. What higher power let countless die, trapped beneath the ground, never once able to see the sun? And what about the men and women up here? The ones he’d seen, torn apart, dismembered by mindless, grinning beasts. What god had been watching over them?

Hanji was too practical for religion. She had something else entirely. Science may not have offered the same assurance as religion, but it gave her something solid, real. The pursuit of knowledge drove her: the prospect of new information gave her life, and the act of study, a semblance of peace. Knowledge had become her god and a tattered, dirty journal, her bible.

People had to have something, she’d said, as they laid side by side, staring up at the sky. Grass pressed into their backs, each blade damp with dew. Above, darkness stretched, absolute, save for the stars.

There were theories, she said, that estimated the oldest of stars aged not in the thousands, nor the millions, but in the billions of years. She admitted it was a number of which she couldn’t practically conceive - and didn’t it make him feel small?

It did.

More than that, he wondered, what were they (who were lucky to live out half a century), to the glowing bodies above. If stars had a memory, would humanity’s fight for survival be worthy of even a measly footnote? What was two hundred, three hundred, even five hundred years against a billion?

It was on nights such as this, that an endless line of faces played through his mind; they started clear and ended blurry. Immeasurable death. And for what?

At some point, she too must have entertained such thoughts. Because there, beneath the stars, she held his hand and told him to find something in which to believe.

Against his hand, her palm was warm. Fingers, rough from both pens and blades, traced his knuckles. He squeezed.

In her, maybe, he could believe.

Her reply was a short (not-quite-a-snort) exhale from her nose.

With grass and dirt at their backs and the stars bearing witness above, he told her he believed in her, so the shit-head had better stick around.

She didn’t.

In the end, science couldn’t save her from a titan’s jaws. And neither could he.

Then again, he’d never been much of a believer.


End file.
